He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned to watch her make her way down to the parking lot, shoulders tense beneath her blue short-sleeved shirt.
How could she still look the same when he was so different?
A phone rang, startling him with its strident digital peal.
“You take it.” The chief tossed him Maya’s cell.
Thorne caught it on the fly as it rang a second time. He struggled to refocus, to bring his wayward brain back from places it had no business being. His voice was gruff when he said, “Wouldn’t it be better to have one of the women answer and pretend to be Dr. Cooper?”
Parry shook his head. “He’ll know. During the other cases, he spliced a line into the PD security cameras so he could watch us at headquarters. Same thing at the museum when Barnes was captured. He’ll be watching somehow. You can bet on it.”
Accepting that, Thorne flipped open the phone and punched it to speaker before he said, “Hello?”
There was a pause—a long, thin stretch of silence with absolutely nothing on the other end.
“Hello?” Thorne prompted again, aware of the others watching him.
There was still no answer. Moments later, the call was disconnected.
Thorne muttered a curse. “Nothing.” He shook his head and returned the phone to Chief Parry, who had his own cell in his hand, perhaps to call in reinforcements at any hint of a break in the case.
Parry held Thorne’s eyes. “Nothing at all?”
Knowing what the chief was asking, Thorne shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m a cop, not a magician.”
Before the chief could respond, Sawyer’s voice crackled from a nearby radio. “We’ve done a quick scan and we haven’t found a thing.”
“There’s no bomb?” the chief said quickly.
Sawyer’s transmitted voice responded, “I can’t be entirely certain until we’ve done a more thorough search. With explosives technology being what it is, a charge could be hidden anywhere. But the other devices this guy used were all pretty standard—none of the molded polymers or really high-power stuff. If he’s sticking with the pattern, I’d expect to find a fairly traditional device. But we’ve got nothing here. Nada.”
“Keep looking.” But when the chief lowered the radio, his expression was pensive. He glanced over at Thorne. “With what you know of him so far, would the Mastermind go to a more advanced explosive?”
“In my opinion?” Thorne stressed the last word, trying to remind the Bear Claw chief that he didn’t specialize in parlor tricks. “I don’t think so. Granted, part of his pattern is that he has very little pattern, but I’d say he has an ego. He wants to be feared, wants to be seen as the best. If he had more advanced technological abilities, I think he would’ve used them already. That leaves us three possibilities.”
The tall blond bombshell who’d been introduced to him as the evidence specialist, Cassie Dumont, raised her eyebrows. “Which are?”
Her prickly tone indicated that she had no intention of liking him.
Thorne answered, “Well, the first option is that our mastermind is playing with us again, that he phoned in a false threat just to watch us scramble. If so, we need to address the question of why he phoned Officer Cooper.” It felt odd to use her title, but it would be equally awkward to use her name for the first time in five years, for the first time since he’d woken up and found her gone after their one strange, disjointed night together.
They’d meant nothing to each other, yet she’d changed his life. A better man would thank her for it.
Instead, Thorne was lined up to take her job.
“He’s targeted her because she’s a woman,” said the lean, rangy cop who’d identified himself as Detective Tucker McDermott, Homicide, “and because she’s a member of the Forensics Department.”
“Maybe,” Thorne said. “Or maybe there’s something else going on here. Option number two is that—regardless of the mechanized voice, which seems to indicate the Mastermind—this could be about a different case entirely.”
Cassie scowled. “Henkes.”
“Right,” Thorne said. The chief had brought him up to speed on the case during the ride to the ranch. “What if one of his supporters is trying to discredit her?”
“Then they’re a bunch of idiots,” Cassie snapped. “Maya’s reputation is impeccable.”
Except for the part where she was suspended for accosting a suspect without proper procedure or backup, Thorne thought, but didn’t say it aloud because the psych specialist’s friends were going to like his third possibility even less.
The chief must have sensed his reluctance, because he said, “And the third possibility?”
Thorne tried not to feel a beat of empathy when he said, “Maybe there was no bomb threat in the first place.”
He’d expected Cassie to blast him, and was mildly surprised when it was Alissa who got in his face in a single smooth, nearly deadly move. She didn’t raise her voice, but her tone was chilly when she said, “What, precisely, are you implying? Are you saying that Maya—logical, grounded, patient Maya—phoned in a fake bomb threat?”
He glanced down toward the parking area. Sawyer’s men must have cleared the vehicles to leave, because he saw a gaggle of kids being herded back onto a school bus. Unerringly, his eyes were drawn to the dainty, dark-haired figure of a woman standing near another woman, apparently deep in conversation.
“Nobody knows precisely what happened that night. All we know for sure is that Henkes was shot with Officer Cooper’s weapon,” he said, more to himself than to the others. “What if…”
He trailed off as he saw her peel away from the others down in the parking lot and head toward the main park entrance.
“What if?” the chief prompted.
“Never mind. I’ll be right back.” Without waiting for the chief’s okay, Thorne picked his way down to the main parking lot. He wasn’t sure what prompted him to follow her—curiosity, maybe, or the memory of the strange flash he’d experienced when she’d brushed past him. But as he hopped over the turnstile and tried to figure out which way she’d turned on the deserted main street, he felt an unfamiliar, unwanted prickling in his brain.
Danger.
“HANNAH?” SEEING NO SIGNS of the little girl who had slipped away from her mother out in the parking lot, Maya cursed under her breath and turned down a cross street toward the pony rides.
She’d promised to find the child, wanting to keep the mother outside, where it was supposedly safe.
Now she wondered whether she should have passed off the request to one of the uniforms, someone with a gun and backup, just in case.
She heard the bellows of agitated bison from the other side of the buildings. According to the ranch hands, the police sirens and unusual activity in the park had upset the animals, leaving them tense and edgy.
She was thankful that the creatures were safe behind the wood-and-electric-wire fencing.
The bomb techs were working somewhere in the park, sweeping each building for explosives, but Maya was alone when she reached the pony ride area and shouted, “Hannah! Hannah, are you in here?”
Smothering the unease, she scanned the